TV Skyline stays ahead of
the game with Kahuna and
Maverik
Case study
Leading German OB company relies
on SAM switchers for reliability and
versatility.
Headquartered in Mainz, Germany,
TV Skyline has been at the forefront of
the OB business for more than 20 years.
When it comes to live event coverage,
TV Skyline knows what it’s doing; you
name it, TV Skyline has covered it – from
Champions’ League and Bundesliga
football, athletics, tennis and ice hockey
to stadium rock, pop and classical
concerts and corporate launches for
giants such as Porsche, VW, Airbus and
Bayer. Recently, TV Skyline has begun
working in a new area – computer
games festivals.
The complete picture
Today, TV Skyline has a fleet of four
OB trucks and four support vehicles as
well as two fully equipped studios in its
headquarters building. In addition, TV
Skyline has developed its own range of
specialist cameras to give its live event
coverage a real edge. Most recently, TV
Skyline has added two Flightpacks to its
offering – comprehensive production
facilities that pack up into around 45
cases ready to ship anywhere in the
world.
Three of the OB trucks and the
Flightpacks are equipped with SAM
Kahuna switchers. OB3 is a 17.5 tonne,
10.5m, 19 camera hard-sided truck
with a 4M/E Kahuna at its heart; OB5
is a 29 tonne, 15.2m articulated truck
that supports up to 20 cameras, and is
equipped with a 4M/E Kahuna switcher.
The flagship of the TV Skyline fleet is
the recently launched OB7, a tripleexpanding 25+ camera articulated
truck that offers full 1080p capability
and 4K-readiness too. At its heart is a
5M/E Kahuna switcher driven from the
revolutionary Maverik configurable
control panel in the main gallery. TV
Skyline also purchased two further
Maverik panels to enable separate
productions needs to be mixed
simultaneously from the single Kahuna
mainframe, or be brought into the
main gallery to provide further switcher
firepower for the main production as
required.
TV Skyline
Kahuna
Maverik
Sirius
The Flightpacks include a 3M/E Kahuna
vision mixer with one Maverik control
panel configured as 3M/E and a second
classic 2 M/E control panel. Each
Flightpack can handle up to 24 camera
feeds and is also equipped with a SAM
Sirius 830 router, using Advanced Hybrid
Processing to maximize I/O capacity in a
compact mainframe.
We chose the
Maverik for OB7
because of the
complete flexibility
its ‘Mav’ modules
give us.
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Case study
Nothing else compares
We visited TV Skyline during its live
coverage of Gamescom in Cologne.
This massive interactive games trade
fair and event was host to a staggering
335,000 visitors in 2014. As well as
reviewing all the latest developments in
interactive gaming, thousands of visitors
watch top gamers competing, and this
is where TV Skyline came in, bringing
OB7 to drive all the live coverage.
“Giving visitors great coverage of The
League of Legends championship series
at Gamescom is equivalent in scale
complexity to a Premier League soccer
match,” says Wolfgang Reeh, Founder
and Owner of TV Skyline. “You have
commentators, experts, field interviews,
studio situations – it’s very demanding
technically with the cameras and most
especially on the vision mixing side. The
Kahuna and Maverik combination is well
up to the challenge; there is no other
switcher from any other manufacturer
that compares.”
Complete flexibility
“It’s a very complex show though it
doesn’t at first look like it,” says TV Skyline
Technical Director, Jakobus Schneider.
“We were using 50-60 macros an hour
and were working on five or six M/Es
– with six to eight keys on each M/E in
constant use. For this event, we had two
TDs sitting side by side so each can have
some source modules and a T bar at
their fingertips.”
We chose the Maverik for
OB7 because of the complete
flexibility its ‘Mav’ modules
give us,” Schneider continues.
“I can choose the size and the
depth of the panel for each
production – do I want three
or four M/Es? This is magical
because we can arrange our
panel exactly as we want it.
And when we need to stretch,
we simply take the extra Mav
modules required from one
of the other trucks to make
a third panel. The Maverik
is very flexible. Every wish
that I have I can realise very
quickly and easily with the
Kahuna and Maverik together.
This stands the Kahuna way
ahead of any other mixer on
the market.
In live event coverage,
alongside versatility and ease
of use, reliability is paramount.
“We have been using Kahunas
for more than 10 years and we
have never had a problem on
air – that is vital to us,” Reeh
concludes.
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